How to generate more leads online

How to Generate Leads Online

No matter what your business does or the industry you compete in, lead generation is a top priority goal. Without lead growth, a business would not be able to grow. Traditional marketing has been an option for many years, but is it working? If you are looking for new and improved ways to increase your leads, here are some online marketing and efforts that will help you with your online lead generation goals.

SEO

What it is: SEO is one of the most common forms of online marketing. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Although it is fairly popular among the online crowd, it is not necessarily well known throughout the business world (but it should be). It is the process of adjusting both the back end of your website as well as the on-page portion. These adjustments are made with the intent to have Google or another search engine, recognize your website for common search queries specific to your industry.

Common SEO practice is the addition of relevant content to your website along with the intent to create a strong backlink profile. With these additions being very relevant and important to search engines, Google, Bing, and so on, will rank your more informative and more recognized website above your competitors, giving your business a much better chance of being clicked on. Although SEO will definitely increase the traffic to your site over an extended period of time (typically 6 months before results are noticed) it does not necessarily guarantee that leads will come from those visits.

Why it works: SEO works because –

The 75% users never scroll past the first page of search results
Users are specifically searching for exactly what you are offering. This eliminates the nuisance of advertisements like TV or radio commercials. This typically means that the user is deeper in the buying funnel and more likely to convert on a lead
In fact, SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate, while outbound leads have a 1.7% close rate.
93% of online experiences begin with a search engine.
There are over 1.2 trillion global searches being conducted each month.

Lead generation is moving towards online SEO due to the influx of internet usage over the past few years. If your business is not participating in search engine optimization, one of your competitors probably are and in turn, they are ranking above you, receiving more clicks to their site, and probably getting more leads because of it.

Conversion Rate Optimization

What it is: Conversion rate optimization is the most productive lead generation tool when paired with SEO. Conversion rate optimization uses information from user experience and the information behind your website to develop optimization ideas to improve interaction, engagement, and lead generation. Basically, with the correct tools in place, you can see how users are interacting with your site. Are they hitting the points of the site that you want them to hit? If they are not, how can we lead a user to do what we want them to do? If they are, how can we squeeze every last drop out of this and receive the best, most qualified leads.

Why it works: Conversion rate optimization, or CRO, allows you to make adjustments strictly based upon your goals. Do you want more people to click on the contact us button? Or even just more engagement on your service/product pages? An agency that offers this service would do research into colors, shapes, wording, and past user experience to create a solution to achieve that goal. They may choose to test the change against the original and run both versions of the website through Google to see which one converts better. CRO could also entail surveys from multiple users and the feedback that they have about your site and how you could make it better. Then again, testing that feedback to see if it offers a better conversion rate. All of this research and testing allow you to find the best converting version of your site, turning your site into a lead generation monster.

PPC

What it is: PPC or Pay Per Click advertising allows you to pay Google or another search engine for the top spot in results on that search engine. Similar to SEO in the way of search result rankings, PPC offers a way to rank in spot one of search results in a very short amount of time. As long as you have the budget, you can rank for as many keywords as you would like. Pay per click can get expensive and be underwhelming in terms of conversions if it is not done correctly.

Anyone can run a PPC campaign. If you set up and AdWords campaign through Google, create a campaign, create ad groups, create ads and add your credit card, you will show. You only have to pay for the ads that users actually clicked on and Google will give you suggestions to “improve” your campaign as needed. These suggestions are often to increase your budget, which could be helpful or could also just be because they’d like to make more money. Either way, if you do your background research and keep up with the account, PPC can be a great asset for lead generation.

Why it works: If you entrust the right agency to monitor your PPC campaign, it not only allows you to do other things with that time, but it allows for your campaign to be supported by background knowledge and experience. Agencies have to stay up to day with the latest information and advancements in Googles adjustments. They know specific phrases that work as a call to actions and those that don’t.

PPC is a good lead generation tool because it allows for fast results. Getting on the first page of search results is obviously beneficial as spoken about previously. PPC allows for your website to jump in rankings as soon as tomorrow. With PPC, you also have the ability to incorporate ad extensions like your phone number or a link to your contact us form. These give users easy access to conversion points on your site and in turn, increase the opportunity for lead generation.

In order to increase your online lead generation, most likely than not, you will have to find an agency that will provide an online marketing service. While you may attempt to tackle these lead generation suggestions on your own, you will probably find that the time and effort it takes to get the results you would like is not plausible on top of your full time job. Finding a quality SEO agency that offers multiple services to expand on would most likely be your best option. Start off small and watch how your leads grow. Overtime, expand on services and find what really works for you and your business.